There are many different methods used to secure electrical boxes within the walls of a building. The most common is, of course, to secure the box directly to the stud. The advantage of this system is that installation is quick and simple but there is no guarantee that all the boxes secured in this fashion will be the same height off the floor. Also, there is no guarantee that all the boxes will be positioned at the same depth within the wall cavity which is important so that any dry-wall ring or other device subsequently secured to the box will fit properly on the wall material.
However, if the architectural plans call for the box or boxes to be mounted some distance from a stud, then these stud-mounting means are futile. In this case, a bracket is required in order to support the box some distance from the stud. There are basically two different types of brackets used for this, either horizontal wall-mounted brackets or vertical floor-mounted brackets. In either case, once a particular electrical box size is selected and secured to the bracket, the installer is thus limited to using only a correspondingly sized dry-wall ring or other cover attachment.
Many varieties of floor-mounted and wall mounted brackets are known. In each of them, however, the box is directly attached to the bracket with no consideration given to securing the box to a separate adapter plate that is then secured to the bracket so as to increase the cover size options available to the installer. In other words, by securing the box to the adapter plate rather than to the bracket, the installer now has the option of using differently sized cover/dry wall rings which would not be possible without the use of the adapter plate.
It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a bracket (which can be either floor, wall or ceiling mounted) for mounting electrical boxes within the walls of a building that overcomes this deficiency. One object of this invention is to provide a bracket/adapter plate combination that is simple in construction and easy to install yet still enables the user to support an electrical box at a variety of different heights above the floor. Another object of this invention is to provide an adapter plate that can accept a variety of different sized cover/dry wall rings so as to cover the opening in an electrical box also secured to the adapter plate. Yet another object of this invention is to provide a bracket to which this adapter plate can be mounted while still allowing for the location of the box to be adjusted as needed, even field adjustment. Still another object of this invention is to provide an adapter plate that can be mounted either directly to a stud or to either a floor or wall mounted bracket. It is yet another object of this invention to provide an adapter plate that is designed so that multiple boxes can be ganged together should the need arise, whether the adapter plate is mounted directly to the stud or to a floor mounted bracket. These and other objects and advantages of this invention will become obvious upon further investigation.